INTRODUCTION
On 9 July 1788 the Prussian government promulgated its infamous Edict on Religion. Written by the conservative minister Johann Christoph Woellner, the text forbade the preaching of heterodox religious ideas, such as Unitarianism, from the pulpit. The enlightened elite across the Protestant German states responded with a flood of pamphlets that branded the edict a counter-enlightened attack on the free use of reason.Footnote 1 The critics’ message was twofold. First, the Enlightenment (Aufklärung) needed a public sphere to emancipate humanity. Second, attempts to limit public discussion were by definition counter-enlightened. Fears of a crackdown were confirmed, or so it appeared, when, several months later, the Prussian state promulgated the Censorship Edict, which tightened controls on print communication. Now, the enlightened public sphere itself was under siege. This “enlightened” interpretation of the Edict on Religion has reigned ever since, as scholars consistently ascribe counter-enlightened, antipublic motivations to Woellner and his circle.Footnote 2 Just to take a recent example, in 2003 Christine Stange-Fayos published a book on the controversy over the edict whose title encapsulates the received wisdom: Lumières et obscurantisme en Prusse.Footnote 3
With the lines drawn so clearly in the historiography, it may come as a surprise that most of the contemporary texts on the edict actually supported it, including one by the enlightened theologian Johann Salomo Semler.Footnote 4 Support for the edict was broad, as educated Germans (Gelehrten) from a variety of disciplines, including law, history, and theology, argued coherently in its favor.Footnote 5 That someone like Semler, whose voluminous works had enshrined the freedom to research and to publish on religious matters, openly supported state interference in religious practice suggests that the issue was more complex than scholars have assumed. Along these lines, consider the behavior of Anton Friedrich Büsching, enlightened theologian, pioneering geographer, and member of the Upper Consistory (Oberkonsistorium), a state committee that monitored Prussia's Lutheran preachers.Footnote 6 While a member of this group, the “enlightened” Büsching tried repeatedly to have the rural preacher Johann Heinrich Schulz dismissed for his publication of heterodox religious works. Büsching failed in the endeavor but, in 1792, the Edict on Religion and Woellner finished the job, and it is thanks largely to Woellner that Schulz is remembered as a victim of state oppression.Footnote 7 Hardly anyone recalls that an enlightened bureaucrat had been among the oppressors.
That the enlightened Büsching and the obscurantist Woellner pursued the same person calls into question accepted readings of not only the Edict on Religion but also the enlightened public sphere. After all, how could men from opposite sides of the Enlightenment/counter-Enlightenment divide have had a common enemy? The answer lies in the particular structure of eighteenth-century Prussia's public. In Prussia the service elite (Staatsdiener)—a group that included both Woellner and Büsching—cultivated a space that excluded people who threatened its continued functioning, a grouping that included the less educated and, as we will see, those among the educated who had not learned how to behave in public. Two factors undergirded this arrangement. First, the elite shared a common educational experience that differentiated them from the rest of their compatriots.Footnote 8 Second, having access to state power gave each member something to lose, in the event that public debate roiled the masses.
The world in which the service elite worked cannot be understood without reference to the structures and events of Prussian history. Eighteenth-century Prussia's economy and society were, for example, highly stratified as a result of the kingdom's overwhelming reliance on agriculture.Footnote 9 The Prussian economy did grow in the eighteenth century, through increased participation in the merchant trade, particularly in the Baltic, and its capital city showed signs of the industrial growth that became prominent in the nineteenth century.Footnote 10 Nevertheless, agriculture remained the kingdom's mainstay throughout the period. In this context, and regardless of Prussia's very real educational revolution, relatively few people had access to either education or the civilizing charms of city life.Footnote 11 Moreover, we must take the politics of limited mobility into account, because those who lacked an academic degree or polished, urbane manners often lived in distant, inaccessible parts. (Even today, Gross-Rietz, the village outside Beeskow that Woellner owned and managed, is well off the beaten path and enjoys only limited bus service.) This situation fostered the sense among urban elites, particularly those in Berlin, that the people needed guidance, especially on religious and political issues. Given the elite's access to state power, it is understandable that limits on debate became basic to the Prussian public sphere.Footnote 12
Prussia's social and economic foundations cast new light on the literature that sees eighteenth-century publicness as a universal and emancipatory phenomenon.Footnote 13 In contrast to what historians have argued with respect to France, the Prussian public sphere was not emancipatory in any politically “revolutionary” sense. Two court cases that emerged from the enforcement of the Edict on Religion confirm that revolution was never part of the public's mission, nor could it have been, given the service elite's socially inscribed interest in controlling debate. The first case, a state prosecution of a writer named Johann Heinrich Würzer, reveals how the service elite excluded politically unreliable elements from the public through expressly legal means. The second, a civil action against a Prussian censor named Johann Friedrich Zöllner, shows how this strategy of exclusion could be inverted; that is, how the public sphere served as a means not only to discipline fellow (and equally elite) bureaucrats but also to exclude sovereign power from public debates. As we will see, most members of the elite agreed that the public sphere could not complete its enlightened civilizing mission were it to become entangled in questions of sovereignty. In this sense the Prussian public sphere had to be suffused with social discipline, so that publicity could serve the state that made all publicity possible. The result was that discipline became basic to the enlightened public.
The legal cases against Würzer and Zöllner are a useful counterpoint to a literature that has often investigated publicity through the analysis of canonical texts.Footnote 14 In contrast, the court documents analyzed below highlight a world of practice that existed outside but permeated canonical debate. Works by luminaries such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Immanuel Kant, Moses Mendelssohn, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and others are, of course, discussed below, but only as mediated through the intrigues of actors within Prussia's legal environment. The point here is threefold: first, it can be shown that if properly contextualized, the rhetorical posturing in the various legal texts unveils a realm of debate and maneuvering that cannot be understood through current approaches to the public sphere. Second, both the legal texts and the world they reveal can be placed in a fruitful dialogue with the more familiar texts in a way that illuminates the tensions produced by the process of the Enlightenment in Germany's Protestant states. Finally, it is hoped that this strategy will open new vistas on the nature and origins of political culture in late eighteenth-century Germany. The Protestant German states did, in this period, produce a fascinating and complex world of philosophical debate, but its public arguments and disagreements cannot be understood without reference to the practical world of governance that provided so many Aufklärer with their daily bread.
COURT DISCIPLINE
On 13 November 1788, six months after his arrival in Berlin, police arrested Johann Heinrich Würzer for criticizing the Edict on Religion in his Comments on the Prussian Edict on Religion of 9 July, along with a Supplement on Freedom of the Press.Footnote 15 After an investigation and trial, the Aulic Court (Kammergericht) sentenced Würzer to six weeks in jail plus court costs. This silencing of a voice raised in defense of liberty seems to confirm Lessing's oft-quoted dictum that Prussia was the most slavish country in Europe. One anonymous commentator's judgment justifies, however, a reconsideration of Lessing's verdict. In 1789, this author wrote,
Everybody agrees on two points: First, they wish the steps the government took against the author of “Remarks on the Edict on Religion” had never happened. Second, at the same time they see the sentence [that] the Aulic Court handed down as a masterpiece . . .Footnote 16
How could a guilty verdict be judged a masterpiece? In order to answer this question, we must reconstruct the context in which the term “masterpiece” was appropriate.
Würzer had arrived in Berlin on May 10, 1788, after completing his studies at the enlightened university in Göttingen. Two months later, the conservative Prussian minister Johann Christoph Woellner promulgated the Edict on Religion, which forbade sermons that undermined popular belief in the Holy Trinity and the truth of the Bible. The literary skirmishing began immediately, and Würzer joined the fray with his Comments. Although Prussian authorities denied him the imprimatur, he found a publisher in the Saxon publishing center of Leipzig, where the censor demanded only minor changes. At this point, Würzer's activities were no different from any other young writer starting a career. The publisher gave him an honorarium of fifty talers and twenty-one copies of the book. Had nothing more happened, Würzer would have been only one among approximately one hundred writers who published something on the edict. He distinguished himself, however, by mailing a copy of the text to Frederick William II, a gesture that the monarch (and, as it turned out, the enlightened elite) did not appreciate. In a letter to Johann von Carmer, the president of the Aulic Court, Frederick William wrote, “The shameless author goes so far in his frenzy as to dedicate the book to me publicly in print, and to mail it to me. I must emphatically make an example of him.”Footnote 17 Frederick William ordered an official investigation, and after looking first in Leipzig, his agents found the offender living in Berlin and placed him under arrest.
The investigation was thorough. Agents inventoried Würzer's apartment and interviewed everyone with whom he had spoken in the previous months. Among the deposed were Jacques Wirth, the defendant's landlord; J. H. W. Würzer, the defendant's uncle; Ernst Wilhelm Würzer, the defendant's cousin; and Erich Biester and Marcus Herz, Berlin literati. In the end, the government filed the following charges: 1) attacking the king (lèse majesté), 2) damaging the state's security, and 3) insulting the king's ministers. For his part, Würzer cooperated with the authorities. In a series of affidavits, he admitted to having written the book in question and to having mailed it to the king.Footnote 18 He denied, however, the substance of the government's charges and claimed only that his accusers were misreading his work. Here, Würzer used a standard rhetorical tool that both permitted and moderated debate among people of equal or higher social status. In eighteenth-century Germany personal honor was always at stake in public debate, and it was, therefore, unacceptable to call out another writer by ascribing error directly to him. Instead, one spoke of misunderstandings and misreadings, or made clear that one was evaluating only the reasons that an author gave for taking a particular position and not the author's moral worth. Würzer's use of this tactic illuminates a basic aspect of Prussian publicity: all statements were judged with respect to the status of both the writer and the reader or, as need arose, of the speaker and the listener.Footnote 19 Put another way, social anxieties permeated publicity, and if we take these as our starting point, we will uncover not only the Prussian public sphere's use of discipline but also a realm of politics that the scholars interested in canonical texts have overlooked.
Many among the elite disapproved of Würzer publicly addressing the king. In this case the disapproval had historical roots, as the behavior of Prussia's kings had long cemented the notion that the sovereign and the public should not mix. Frederick William I (1713–40) had had little respect for scholars, and his son Frederick II (1740–86), for all his interest in the Enlightenment, preferred to speak French and lived in Potsdam, leaving Berlin's intellectual scene to Bürger such as Friedrich Nicolai and Moses Mendelssohn. When Frederick William II (1786–97) came to the throne it was against the backdrop of royal indifference if not outright hostility to the German intellectual world. As a result, there was no tradition of debating (or criticizing) the sovereign, particularly in the manner of French “Grub Street” writers, and one result was that the public became a relatively limited space.Footnote 20 Part of the reason behind this restriction was the fear of state intervention, which led German intellectuals to oppose scurrilous writings (Pasquillen) as needlessly provocative.Footnote 21 Equally important, however, was the perceived social distance from the masses, a distinction that was institutionalized in the pedagogic movement known as Volksaufklärung.Footnote 22 Here, the Aufklärer justified his (always) oversight by characterizing the people as superstitious, uneducated, and in need of supervision.Footnote 23 The flip side of this arrangement was that since the average peasant did not read enlightened journals, members of the elite were free to debate general issues in print.
Prussia's historical situation offers additional perspective in the tensions that lay behind Würzer's conviction. The enlightened jurist Johann von Carmer wrote the decision and his finding of guilt against Würzer, “for comments against the Edict on Religion . . . made in a disrespectful and derisive tone,” is a complicated, Janus-faced maneuver in which acquittal and conviction flow through the text simultaneously.Footnote 24 On the one hand, by convicting Würzer of a lesser crime, one with which he had not even been charged, Carmer acquitted him of the more serious charges of attacking the king, damaging the state's security, and insulting the king's ministers. On the other hand, by redefining the nature of the offense Carmer also smuggled a new accuser into the case, the enlightened service elite. Carmer's personal background offers more information on this subtext.Footnote 25 A noble by birth, he had studied law at Jena and Halle between 1739 and 1743, before pursuing a career in state service that extended through the reigns of three Prussian kings. Initially, Carmer distinguished himself while on assignment in the Prussian provincial capital of Breslau, where he came to the attention of the legal reformer Samuel Cocceji, who became his patron. Carmer, in turn, was also a friend and patron to two other legal reformers, Karl Gottlieb Svarez and Ernst Ferdinand Klein, with whom he collaborated for years on the Allgemeine Landrecht, going so far as to share a house with them in order to facilitate the work.Footnote 26 If Carmer's decision straddled uneasily the contrary forces in Prussian public life, his own background encompassed the same tensions.
The tense world to which Carmer draws our attention served, in turn, as the terra firma for a particular kind of public politics. Put most simply, Carmer used his position to justify an order within the public sphere and did so by manipulating historical symbols that most members of the public recognized. His decision on Würzer was, therefore, a form of political negotiation, and in order to understand Carmer's moves within that negotiation, we need, first, to recognize that eighteenth-century Prussia's political idiom was rooted in conscience.Footnote 27 Whereas we think in terms of an abstract individual with extensive rights, in Prussia the individual's rights began with, and did not extend beyond, the bounds of conscience.Footnote 28 The distinction is significant. Born in German Protestant denigration of the papacy and the Inquisition, this vision of conscience held that everyone had the right to believe differently about religious issues, no matter what the state said. The corollary was, however, that the dissenting subject had to tolerate state interference when maintenance of public order required it. As Immanuel Kant argued, “in some matters of a general interest is a certain mechanism necessary through which members of the general public are obliged to comport themselves in a passive manner . . . here it is surely not permitted to argue; but one must obey.”Footnote 29
The need to balance freedom with public order was enshrined in a system of religious education and control. Prussia had a network of consistories that oversaw all preachers, both rural and urban. Preachers were particularly important, because in addition to teaching the Word, their direct contact with their congregations made them the first defense against bad behavior, especially in rural areas. Preachers were subject to this system of politico-religious control, in so far as they were expected to teach only approved doctrines. (They did, however, have some freedom to publish the fruits of their own research in elite journals.) Thus, although all people had the right to determine what they chose to believe—preachers included—no one had the right to contest the established teachings in public, for fear that such speculations might have sparked sectarian violence. Religious discussion was, therefore, deeply political, and whatever the reservations Prussian intellectuals harbored toward the Edict on Religion, the desire to limit the damage that untutored speech could do was as apparent in the edict as it was in enlightened bureaucratic practice.Footnote 30
The mixture of freedom with oversight does not appear terribly modern, but it had the virtue of historical legitimacy. A central lesson that many eighteenth-century Protestants took from the Reformation was that constraint in matters of conscience created political unrest. As the eighteenth-century theologian Johann Georg Walch wrote, “The constraint of conscience is here so great that as history shows, and particularly the wars of religion, it can give rise to the greatest confusion and disorder in civic society.”Footnote 31 The memory of Germany's confessional wars perdured, and as a result many among the educated elite believed domestic tranquility was guaranteed by maintaining a place within the individual for contrary opinions. Moreover, with political rights beginning in conscience, freedom's progress was defined through the state's withdrawal from areas that had been disciplined, beginning, as Immanuel Kant argued, with religion.Footnote 32 People who had learned to think freely without fomenting rebellions could be left alone, or as Wilhelm Humboldt wrote in his unpublished essay on the Edict on Religion,
Everything depends not only on the diversity of the character, but also on the diversity of the soul's moods in the different stages of life. One should not judge an action before one has examined exactly the physical, intellectual, and moral capacities of the actor . . . [T]his measure is only important where it applies to the regulation of inner moral worth, not where one considers completely different, external ends . . .Footnote 33
Humboldt throws into relief the relationship between social exclusion and intellectual achievement that became fundamental to the late Enlightenment in Prussia specifically, and the German Protestant states more generally. If intellectual achievement justified greater freedom in public discussion, it also demanded social and political disciplining of one's inferiors. The real problem was to determine who had the right not to be considered an inferior.
Carmer's decision mediated the tension between the Enlightenment's long-term goal of greater freedom and the short-term need for social discipline.Footnote 34 In this context Würzer could be—perhaps, even had to be—both convicted and acquitted. Let us consider how Carmer achieved these seemingly contradictory ends. He began by exonerating Würzer against the first two of the state's charges—lèse majesté and damaging the state's security—and used the purity of the accused's intentions as exculpatory evidence: “Anyway, the accused insists that eagerness for humanity's benefit in general and especially in the Prussian states drove him not only to write this pamphlet, but also to dedicate it and send it to the lawgiver.”Footnote 35 The conscience-laden language served as rhetorical insulation; if Würzer's reform program were intentionally abstract and general, then the sovereign could not have been attacked. Of course, the rub was that Würzer had insulted the power center by deigning to speak to the king directly. Since the public needed to maintain its access to the king, careful adjudication was needed here. Continuing his defense of Würzer, Carmer noted expressly that the book had exhorted Prussian subjects to obey rightful authority. (Had Würzer called for the King's downfall, the case would have ended much differently.) Carmer added that in mailing the text to the king Würzer had treated the sovereign with the respect that was due to a scholar (Gelehrter). He concluded,
In fact, one must assume that it was not his intention to tread too closely to the King's honor, since he believed it was possible for the King to err in the educated controversy over the symbolic books’ value without damage to his royal virtues.Footnote 36
This moment is, perhaps, the most significant in the text, for in it Carmer's defense of the accused became coterminous with a defense of a carefully circumscribed public sphere. For Carmer, to believe that the king could err in an educated controversy was not an attack on the king's sovereign honor, but was an attempt to engage him as a Gelehrter. That Würzer had misjudged this particular king did not need to be underscored. More important was Carmer's broader point: the sovereign, as sovereign, had no place in the public sphere, because state power invariably polluted the public, a space that many Germans conceived of as a moral realm.Footnote 37 In this sense, the Reformation's construction of conscience reverberated through eighteenth-century Prussia, and in so far as the public guaranteed freedom of discussion, it did so within strict limits.
Given the significance of Gelehrter to this discussion, some additional analysis of its eighteenth-century meaning is in order.Footnote 38 In the eighteenth century the term's meaning expanded beyond the academic world, in large measure because the public sphere came to include new types of educated people, especially the Staatsdiener who had studied at university and read the newspapers, even if they did not occupy an academic position.Footnote 39 The shift toward a broader public, one outside the confines of scholarship, then opened a new thread of discussion, in which the elite redefined their rights and duties for the changed situation. Würzer's case signaled, however, that this scholarly world's limits were being challenged in new ways, and probably by a younger generation.Footnote 40 (We cannot pursue the issue in detail here, but it is worth noting that Würzer, who had no government position, was thirty-seven years of age at the time he published his Comments, while Carmer was sixty-seven and Woellner fifty-six. Consider also that Johann Semler and Anton Büsching were, at the same moment, sixty-three and sixty-four respectively, while Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, two critics of the edict, were twenty-one and twenty-six.) Hence changes in the public sphere's foundations engendered concerns about public debate's political effects.Footnote 41
The anxieties that lay behind the growth in publicness are apparent in the next part of Carmer's decision. Having insulated Würzer from the most damaging charge of lèse majesté, Carmer now had two additional tasks: first, to exonerate Würzer from the additional charges of damaging the state's security and insulting the King's ministers, and second, to justify a conviction on a different charge. These two imperatives delineate more clearly the intellectual boundaries that Prussia's bureaucratic elite patrolled. Carmer, Würzer, and all the king's ministers were products of the same social and educational system. Woellner, for example, studied at the enlightened university in Halle, was a reviewer for the enlightened Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, and was a practicing Freemason for many years.Footnote 42 Thus all the participants in the affair were, in fact, colleagues broadly defined—a status that entitled all of them to discuss matters of significance in a realm dedicated to academic debate.Footnote 43
Würzer had, however, challenged the boundaries of this comfortable world, and as a product of the Enlightenment his behavior reflected poorly on everyone. Hence Carmer's decision had to include, along with the acquittal/conviction, a parallel defense of the enlightened public sphere. Carmer took up all of these tasks by noting that Würzer's contribution was formally legal. He insisted (rightly) that judging the state's edicts and evaluating the reasoning behind them was established law. Thus he found that Würzer had not insulted the ministers, since the former had followed standard academic practice, which the king's ministers, as educated types, should know to respect. The real problem lay in the danger that Würzer's tone presented to elite culture. Carmer wrote,
In his criticism of the edict, the accused used not only derisive but also harsh comments. Under the concept harsh comments are understood to be ones that either express the critic's indignation against the one being criticized, or are intended to arouse indignation in the teacher or listener against the one criticized. However, that the accused ventured to express his indignation against his Royal Majesty personally cannot be established.Footnote 44
Carmer held that Würzer's work encouraged others to disrespect established practices, and since disrespect was dangerous for a society without a strong, mobile police force, this aspect of Würzer's work had to be punished. Given its political and economic foundations Prussia could not sustain a public sphere in which its members did not practice extensive self-censorship.Footnote 45 Moreover, with the elite embedded in state authority, public disrespect of their positions not only undermined the public sphere but also threatened the Enlightenment as a whole. The conclusion was inevitable: Würzer needed discipline, for the sake of the Enlightenment.
Carmer's decision was a difficult compromise between competing needs: to discipline Würzer and to defend the boundaries of intellectual freedom. The compromise worked largely because it was based on social norms rather than legal principles; that is, the case boiled down to one Gelehrter scolding another for recklessness. The social foundations of Carmer's decision were reflected most clearly in his attempts to insulate the Enlightenment from the affair, as he noted that Würzer worked alone on his book, expressly citing the testimony of Johann Erich Biester and Marcus Herz, members of the enlightened circle in Berlin, who had claimed no knowledge of the book. This was another important moment, because by explaining how Würzer had worked without aid and counsel, Carmer actually exonerated both the accused and Berlin's enlightened elite. If anything, Würzer was guilty of having taken insufficient instruction from the Enlightenment. Carmer added,
Mind you, this thoughtlessness was more punishable through his dedicating the book to the King and by his speaking to the monarch directly. Anyone who addresses another person is required through the act of speaking to display greater respect than he would otherwise be.Footnote 46
Here we return to the Prussian public sphere's ambivalence toward sovereign power. The sovereign's relationship with the public was a touchy subject, since the former could limit freedom of the press. For that reason, firebrands like Würzer had to be taught how to behave, and since the service elite provided this education, the power center could be certain that enlightened publicity would never harm the state.
Carmer's decision reveals how the enlightened service elite used their power to limit the public sphere's boundaries. By making the case against harsh words—especially those directed at the king—Carmer secured the public sphere. By making the case for rules of conduct, however, he also transformed the specific offense against the king into a more general transgression of the rules of propriety; the king was ushered aside and an offended elite took his place. That we are dealing with an exclusive group is especially apparent in Carmer's response to an inconvenient fact. Würzer's uncle had, indeed, warned him not to send his book to the king, a detail that threatened Carmer's exculpation of Würzer's conscience. Carmer responded, “That he [Würzer] ignored the warnings from the uneducated gardener Würzer [the uncle] cannot make his actions more punishable.”Footnote 47 One may expect that to ignore a warning proves knowledge and intent, and ought to be grounds for a harsher sentence. In this case, however, the warning came from a gardener—someone definitely not in the enlightened club. Carmer the enlightened bureaucrat was not above using snobbery to defend publicity and elite autonomy. Indeed, snobbery was essential to this Enlightenment.
Carmer's decision was a masterpiece, because it secured the Prussian public sphere against outside interference from both above and below. On the one hand, the decision kept both the king and the masses out of the public sphere, guaranteeing thereby a measure of intellectual freedom. On the other hand, it cultivated that freedom by affirming the practices that most educated Prussians believed made public debate possible. Against this backdrop, convicting Würzer of lesser charges, and for social reasons, is the decision's masterstroke, because it justified a carefully balanced punishment. Würzer received six weeks in jail and a fifty-taler fine. The fine covered the honorarium, and since Würzer had already spent six weeks in jail, the sentence yielded an immediate release. As a man of the Enlightenment and a state servant, Carmer integrated competing and, to a degree, incompatible goals. For that reason, his adjudication resulted in a legal acquittal that was, in turn, wrapped in a social conviction.
DISCIPLINING THE STATE
Some months after Würzer's trial ended, another scandal erupted in Berlin. It began on 17 December 1790, when the publisher Johann Friedrich Unger advertised a book by the preacher J. B. Gebhardt entitled Scrutiny of the Reasons Given in Support of His Opinion by the Author of the Little Text “Is a Universal State Catechism Necessary?” Footnote 48 Gebhardt's book was a response to Christian Friedrich Herzlieb's Is a Universal State Catechism Necessary, and How Must It Be Procured? Footnote 49 On its surface, this appears to be another in the pulsing stream of books that German academics published on matters that meant a great deal to them at the time. Given that Gebhardt's text followed the forms of academic debate, it is not surprising that Unger, the publisher, had received the imprimatur from the censor, Johann Friedrich Zöllner, who had ruled, “I can find nothing in this little book on account of which the imprimatur should be denied.”Footnote 50
The little book became a big political issue. The day after the advertisement appeared Unger received a letter from Woellner, dated 4 January 1791, which ordered him not to sell any of the books under threat of a hundred-ducat penalty. Seven days later, Woellner wrote to the president of the Superior Consistory (Oberkonsistorium), Thomas Philipp von der Hagen, and charged that the book “openly practices punishable criticism of our most highly decreed introduction of a general catechism for the Christian religion, and, thus, its content runs counter to our official intentions.”Footnote 51 Poor Unger seems unknowingly to have published a book that criticized Woellner's pet project. On closer inspection, however, things are not so simple.
In order to understand the debate, we must recognize that this case was never actually about censorship of a book by the state, but about the working relationship between the state and the intellectual elite. It would be easy to overlook this point, since the case began as a simple matter of property rights. Saddled with five hundred copies of a book that had received the imprimatur but could not be sold, Unger was justified in seeking compensation. Woellner, for his part, could have ended the matter by compensating Unger with government funds, but instead ordered Unger to seek compensation directly from Zöllner. This decision threw the whole issue into the courts, which was a big mistake, because it meant the courts would have the chance now to adjudicate the enlightened public sphere's social concerns. Here the social aspects of publicity become important again, although from a slightly different perspective, as Unger and Zöllner were probably in working in league. Both were members of the cultural elite—the former a publisher and professor, the latter an author and censor—and probably knew each other professionally and socially. (Unger had just published one of Zöllner's sermons and Unger's home was also a center of sociability in Berlin.)Footnote 52 Hence the cultural and social commitments that these men shared not only gave them a joint stake in maintaining Prussia's public sphere but also aligned them with the interests of the broader service elite. In this context, a court case was the perfect means to beat down Woellner, because, as we saw above, court proceedings necessarily mixed discipline with publicity.
Unger and Zöllner used the Prussian court system to discipline a rival within the government. Their trap was sprung with a specious letter from Unger to Zöllner in which the former asked the latter for compensation. Zöllner replied that the bill was such a piddling amount as to be an insult (Beleidigung) and wrote,
Since I will never decide to pay this request except in accordance with a legal decision, so I leave it to you to sue me before the Royal Aulic Court. Moreover, since your acts have insulted me, by seeking to mitigate your full legal due out of consideration for me, I strongly beseech you to enforce your full legal rights against me.Footnote 53
Unger had not really insulted Zöllner, since the actual insult came from Woellner. Zöllner's demonstrated pique was, however, another sign of the continued significance of the elite's social concerns. As a member of the educated elite and a Staatsdiener, Zöllner had standing, in the sense that his achievements guaranteed to him certain rights and privileges. Put another way, like most academics his educational and professional odyssey had made him a creature of honor, which meant that he bitterly resented interference in the performance of his duties. Thus Woellner had wounded Zöllner's honor when he used state power to overrule the sound judgments that Zöllner had made as a Gelehrter in state service. And since Woellner was no more than an equal to any of Prussia's Staatsdiener, his insult of Zöllner also held implications for every Gelehrter on the king's payroll.
Unger and Zöllner's relative positions—on opposite sides of the state/public divide—illuminate the dense interconnections between the state and the public sphere in Prussia. (The actual progress of the case need not concern us, although Unger did lose his bid for compensation.) The case served two purposes: first, to protect the bureaucratic elite's freedom of action within the state, and second, to protect the public sphere against excessive control. That these two goals could be joined in a legal case was a product, in part, of Prussian reformers’ efforts to develop a modern legal apparatus by making the law a public issue. This trend served the state, in so far as it had allowed the bureaucracy to use print media to publicize legal decisions and edicts. The diffusion of state information worked on two levels. On the one hand, preachers were often required to read edicts aloud during Sunday services.Footnote 54 On the other hand, Prussia's legal proceedings became the subject of elite discussion in print, with the great debate in the 1770s about the Allgemeine Landrecht being only the most famous example.Footnote 55 Zöllner, for his part, was able to take advantage of this tradition of publicity, because, as a Prussian subject, he had the right to read his defense into the court record, which made everything he wrote publishable.Footnote 56 There was, thus, no separating Zöllner's legal strategy from the public sphere, as everything he wrote in his own defense was also intended for public consumption.
Zöllner's case offers a sharp glimpse into the relationship between the state and the public in eighteenth-century Prussia. Let us begin by examining Zöllner's rhetorical strategy, in order to see how it reflects the public sphere's structures. Much like Carmer had done for Würzer, Zöllner began his defense by reframing the question. In his brief he noted that the case was not about the losses Unger had incurred, but about whether he, Zöllner, had acted appropriately while in the state's service. He framed his defense by posing four questions: 1) Did he err in approving the book? 2) If so, was the error large enough to assign liability to him personally? 3) Were he liable, ought he then to compensate Unger not only for costs but also for lost profits? 4) Was Unger's accounting of costs and lost profit correct? Zöllner concerned himself with the first two questions, arguing that the second two were relevant only in the event of a conviction. There is probably some truth to this, though it is notable that the first two questions were the ones that affected the enlightened elite's broader interests. Along these lines, consider Zöllner's response to Unger's complaint:
As for the publisher Unger's claim that the Department of Ecclesiastical Affairs’ order obliges me to reimburse him for his losses, I do not see the slightest legal justification for it. The plaintiff will be hard pressed to cite a law from which it follows that the authority of the order's author [Woellner] gives someone a right to a third party's property. No trace of such a law is to be found in the Royal Prussian States. Moreover, with as little historical knowledge as I have acquired, I believe, nonetheless, that in no state in the world where departmental orders and property exist, can such a law be found, because the concept of property itself excludes the arbitrary control of a stranger over my [things].Footnote 57
Two elements are notable. First, Zöllner did not put the censor's role as censor in doubt, but instead justified his actions in office. Second, his assertion of the right to both due process and private property for state servants offered a way to formalize the relationship between the state and its bureaucracy.Footnote 58 Given the monarchy's history of interference in bureaucratic matters this issue would have been of great concern to state servants.
By emphasizing law as protection from arbitrary government actions, Zöllner broached a touchy subject. It was especially during the late eighteenth century that Prussians identified their government with law, believing that power was legitimate if exercised within a legal framework. Zöllner would have understood this perspective, since, as a preacher in Berlin's Marienkirche and a member of the Mittwochsgesellschaft—a group of elites that met in Berlin on Wednesdays to discuss issues relevant to the Enlightenment—he moved in the social circles created by education and state power.Footnote 59 Moreover, Zöllner carefully underscored in his brief that the law had become a public enterprise, expressly taking note of the academic discussion that surrounded the Allgemeine Landrecht. He wrote, “And these [discussions] were in no way forbidden as contrary to the laws, but were accepted gratefully as a contribution for illuminating an important issue from all sides.”Footnote 60 Indeed, Zöllner said nothing new here, as his audience had long believed that academics should evaluate laws, because they could be relied upon to argue responsibly. Zöllner even went so far as to observe that this right had been enshrined, once again, in Prussian law by Carmer's verdict on Würzer.Footnote 61
Zöllner's citing of the decision against Würzer highlights another instance of bureaucrats using state power to shape the public sphere. Here, as for Carmer, the history of Protestantism and the rhetoric of conscience undergirded the understanding of print freedom. Consider Zöllner's legal analysis:
The Edict on Censorship does not say with any words that the censor must judge whether a text could cause damage under certain conditions; such a requirement would ostensibly end all scholarship. Every text can cause damage and every censor can imagine conditions under which damage would occur. Whereas one person, by virtue of a Logica Probabilium, sees nothing but damage everywhere, another expects a greater sum of good.Footnote 62
These words are hardly a ringing endorsement of free press, and that is probably because Zöllner's main concern was to save scholarship, not to eliminate constraints on publication. Put another way, Zöllner's support for scholarship was simultaneously a political and social statement, in that it justified autonomy only with reference to a small community whose academic credentials and state responsibilities guaranteed good behavior.Footnote 63 Hence Zöllner's claim that the Edict on Religion left room for the personal judgments of the censor justified his granting the imprimatur to Unger and Gebhardt while also precluding interference in his daily work. In this context, Zöllner's reference to Logica Probabilium was a brilliant cheap shot. Logica Probabilium was a form of reasoning invented by Jesuits to soften the Catholic doctrine of sin. In it the confessor considered a range of possible motivations for a penitent's sinful acts, before (invariably) choosing the least base as the true cause, thus minimizing God's wrath. Zöllner's citation of Jesuit logic associated Woellner with clerical control over conscience—a danger that the Reformation had (supposedly) averted. In Prussia's public sphere, to impinge on the enlightened bureaucracy was to act like a Catholic.
If freedom were to advance, both the state and the public sphere had to be policed by the right people. This is why Zöllner never called for complete freedom of expression; in this world, freedom lay with the censor and not the writer. This approach was perfectly consistent with the position Zöllner had taken in 1785, when he lamented in an article in the Berlinische Monatsschrift that lies and untruths often made their way from print into common speech. Some truths were best left unspoken:
it seems that a very large segment of our writers does not know what discretion is. Hence, it happens that so much that is certainly true in and of itself, but would best remain unspoken, is so easily written into the public sphere.Footnote 64
The general public was not prepared for every form of truth, and Zöllner concluded,
All of this has for a long time inspired in me the wish that some prince would found an academy that would make its primary purpose merely to determine the reliability of new reports, observations, and experiments, and to separate true from false, doubtful from certain.Footnote 65
Zöllner registered his concern about the misuse of the public three years before the Edict on Religion was promulgated in 1788. By 1790 his position had not substantially changed, as he accepted his role as a censor, even if he disliked his superior. In Prussia there was no inherent contradiction in Zöllner playing the role of both censor and writer. Indeed, true critical debate could not occur without censorship, and in this respect Zöllner did not separate the public from the state, but extended each deeply into the other.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
The public spheres in Germany's other Protestant states were structured much like Prussia's sphere, as most states kept a wide variety of educated Staatsdiener on the payroll, including bureaucrats, agricultural managers, tax collectors, and preachers.Footnote 66 (Preachers were normally paid by the local community, but came to be seen as Staatsdiener.Footnote 67) The relationship was reciprocal: growing state apparatuses needed skilled functionaries and sought them among the numerous newly minted holders of university degrees who, as it happened, needed jobs.Footnote 68 The significance of this system lies in the kind of person that it created.Footnote 69 Having access to both education and, later, elite circles of power, the budding state servant was able to participate often enthusiastically in the enlightened debate through reading, writing, and parlor discussion, while respecting the state that maintained the peace.
With so many among the “enlightened” implicated in state power, maintaining political stability became fundamental to the public sphere across the Protestant states. Regardless of their theoretical commitments to the Enlightenment, most members of the bureaucratic elite were conservative in both political and social terms. In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should note that I am not referring to an overarching conservative ideology, but am using the term in a positional rather than ideological sense.Footnote 70 Members of the educated elite neither opposed all change nor sought change for its own sake. Instead, they preferred gradual changes within a system in which they had a stake.Footnote 71 Moreover, as elites they distinguished sharply between the educated, who deserved greater latitude in thought and action, and ordinary folk, who needed continual oversight. Against this backdrop, the bureaucratic elite could call for more freedom of thought among the right sort, while accepting social control of the great mass, or, in the original German, der grosse Haufen.Footnote 72
Now, let us consider the historiography of the enlightened public sphere.Footnote 73 Most works on the eighteenth-century public sphere concentrate on its emancipatory potential, with scholars arguing that a rising, literate bourgeoisie cultivated a realm of intellectual freedom through the growing print market and the burgeoning number of social clubs, including salons and Freemasonic lodges.Footnote 74 The increasingly sharp criticism of the ancien régime that emerged from these independent spheres desacralized the early modern state and, ultimately, instigated a total collapse in France in 1789. It is ironic, perhaps, that although the public sphere had its revolutionary impact in France, the first scholars to identify it as a historical force are German. In 1959, in Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society, Reinhart Koselleck recognized the eighteenth century's new sociability as a source of political instability.Footnote 75 Writing from a post-Revolutionary and post-Cold War perspective, Koselleck took a conservative and critical position against the new sociability's practitioners, charging them with irresponsibility for bringing down an entire sociopolitical system without offering an alternative. In 1962 Jürgen Habermas responded with The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society.Footnote 76 In this text Habermas did not dispute the public sphere's revolutionary impact. Instead, consistent with his own left-liberal politics, he exculpated the state's bourgeois critics by celebrating the emancipatory potential of rational criticism.
Although Habermas and Koselleck cast their respective positions within different normative or political frameworks, they agreed on three points. First, the eighteenth-century public sphere was a bourgeois phenomenon that comprised a host of people who not only had sufficient property and resources to acquire education, but also stood outside the state.Footnote 77 Second, the public sphere was an independent realm of discussion and, for that reason, undermined the authority of the early modern state. Finally, both saw the public sphere as a precondition for modernity, and it is along these lines that Koselleck and Habermas's collective insights have exerted their greatest influence on the historical literature.
Now, we come to a problem: neither Prussia specifically, nor Germany more generally, had a political revolution in the eighteenth century, in spite of Germany's vigorous and varied public sphere.Footnote 78 So what are we to do with publicity in the German states? We could retreat, of course, into the classic “retrograde Prussia/Germany” argument, in order to explain the absence of revolution.Footnote 79 But this holds early modern publicity to a standard created for the French Revolution and, as such, impedes the historical understanding of what Germany did have.Footnote 80 It may serve us better, therefore, to understand eighteenth-century Germany's political stability as evidence for the richness and power of publicity in the German-speaking world. In the German states the instinct to publish had, by the late eighteenth century, resulted in the publication of thousands of works that plumbed a host of issues, ranging from the brutally practical (the best use for manure) to the hopelessly abstract (the destiny of Man). This wave of publications may well have created a sense of inclusion among Protestant Germans, and especially Prussians, that obviated the perceived need for a revolution, or some kind of uprising, especially in the context of the relatively good governance that many German states provided.Footnote 81 Unfortunately, existing approaches to publicness see the German public sphere (almost defensively) as politically tame but philosophically daring; that is, Germany's real revolution came in the form of Kant's philosophy.Footnote 82 However, by emphasizing the pursuit of metaphysical freedom over other possible goals, scholars have lost precisely what was political and contested in the German public sphere up until the French Revolution.Footnote 83 The legal cases that were discussed above suggest that there was as much politics in Carmer and Zöllner's worlds as there was on the other side of the Rhine, if of a different sort. The task is, therefore, to understand the public sphere in Germany through the local and historical contexts that defined what the political was.Footnote 84
In no case is the historical-contextual problem clearer than in the scholarly work on the famous “What is Enlightenment?” debate.Footnote 85 In an analysis of Immanuel Kant's famous essay on the topic Rüdiger Bittner concluded, “What enlightenment in particular promises is an open world: freedom.”Footnote 86 There is some truth to Bittner's position, provided that we ignore not only how state power permeated the intellectual elite's world but also the social rules there were cultivated within it.Footnote 87 Consider Moses Mendelssohn, paragon of Enlightenment in Germany, who articulated a strikingly conservative approach to Enlightenment in his contribution to the debate. After noting in his “What Is Enlightenment?” that social rank (Stand) and profession (Beruf) determined each person's rights and duties, he wrote, “But they require of each individual—in accord with his social rank and profession, theoretical insights, and the skills necessary for reaching the same—a different level of enlightenment.”Footnote 88 With these words, Mendelssohn spoke for many Aufklärer, though by no means all. (There were a few radicals like Carl Friedrich Bahrdt.) Mendelssohn and his fellow Aufklärer shared the view that Enlightenment was Man's natural right, even as they calibrated it for the individual man's social position and abilities.Footnote 89
In eighteenth-century Germany, print discussion was an elite affair that allowed the enlightened to discipline both the state and the populace. It is true that the fear of a government crackdown was always present.Footnote 90 Nonetheless, the fear of popular unrest was as widespread, and the result was a broad emphasis on reform without revolution. This interest in managed change highlights one of the German Enlightenment's essential aspects: it combined paeans to freedom with social control. Where the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant exhorted people to enlighten themselves, Johann Stuve, an educational reformer in the Duke of Braunschweig's employ, wanted the state to enlighten the populace. Stuve held that the state
should make it a requirement only for the most reasonable from among its salaried servants, for example a jurist, a doctor, a cameralist, a teacher, to deliver in a plain manner a weekly one-hour lecture on the area of his expertise that is most publicly useful. One ought thereby always to act in accordance with the conditions and requirements of the time and choose that which will have the strongest effect on practical behavior.Footnote 91
As Stuve makes clear, the uneducated were to be tutored on practical matters. Freedom to theorize came only after stabilizing virtues had been inculcated, or as Karl Leonhard Reinhold, the first holder of a chair in critical philosophy at the University of Jena, put it, “the philosopher teaches; the rabble learns.”Footnote 92
Reinhold's sentiments underscore how the German public sphere combined emancipation with discipline. The most obvious aspect of enlightened disciplining was that the service elite itself determined what the masses could read and say in public, and this was why there was no great outcry against censorship per se; as a practical matter, the censors came from the enlightened elite.Footnote 93 In 1784 Ernst Ferdinand Klein—the jurist, professor at Halle, and legal reformer in Berlin—offered this outline:
When, for that reason, Prussia's ruler wants the censor to suppress writings against the state; he understands only those [writings] which attack the state itself, betray it to its enemies, free its subjects from the duty to obey, and which cause civil unrest, but not [those that are] modest evaluations [Urtheile] of rules made by the prince or his servants.Footnote 94
Klein highlights a theme that ran through many German discussions: the public sphere needed rules and overseers, if criticism were to have a positive effect.
The idea that the enlightened public sphere was fundamentally an emancipatory phenomenon that assumed a critical posture toward state power is too narrow for the complexities of eighteenth-century Europe. As I have noted, in Protestant Germany too many of the elite were part of the state for the public sphere to be an independent realm. Indeed, the elite's penetration of the state apparatus yielded a different public space, one that was neither completely free nor completely unfree. In this realm of moderate intellectual freedom, the Aufklärer associated many of their goals with the state's monopoly on force. It was, after all, Immanuel Kant who argued that Prussia enjoyed great intellectual freedom, because its army guaranteed stability. German writers had the right to publish on matters of general concern, but if they strayed into scurrilous attacks, both the state and its bureaucratic elite closed ranks in the name of stability. This public sphere was completely different from the one that Koselleck and Habermas envisioned, but neither its existence nor its significance can be denied.
CONCLUSION
When Immanuel Kant famously defined enlightenment as sapere aude! (“dare to know!”), his call to enlightenment was expressly limited in social and political terms.Footnote 95 Only responsible people could be free of tutelage, and until all people were capable of thinking on their own, state oversight would be not only an unfortunate but also a necessary component of the Enlightenment. The German Enlightenment's didacticism (not to mention its pedantry) was an outgrowth of this bedrock association between freedom and social control. In 1788 the enlightened Johann Georg Schlosser put the case thus in “On Book Censorship and Publicity”:
I believe that the only means through which this freedom can be maintained is if we make our writings as useful as they can be for our age; and the most certain means for losing it, is when we misuse it.Footnote 96
He added, with a touch of irony, “There remains, perhaps, nothing other than for the good writers to lower themselves, at least for some time, to being the censors for the bad ones.”Footnote 97 Schlosser wearied of the constant threats to free thought. Still, his underlying position was traditional: good publicity improved both the people and the state, while bad publicity destroyed the system on which the public sphere was founded.
The strength of this belief structure became apparent in 1797, when Frederick William II died, presumably taking his counter-enlightened edicts with him.Footnote 98 Although this monarch's death was perceived by some writers as liberating, concerns about freedom and order coursed through the German public sphere. In 1798 an anonymously authored article entitled “Well-Intentioned Recollections for Today's Writers in Our States” appeared in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, the mouthpiece of Enlightenment in Prussia.Footnote 99 In it the author lamented the sophomoric content of the pamphlets (Flugschriften) that writers produced in response to the regime change, writing, “Although I had prepared myself for much bad and vulgar [writings], here were countless more [than I had anticipated].”Footnote 100 The author then claimed that such pamphlets spread dissatisfaction and disruption in society and issued this call:
My dear authors, there is still time. Do not force the government itself to deprive you again of a freedom that you have desired for so long, but whose misuse reveals that you do not know how to use it. The peace of society, the uninjured security of all, and finally [public] morals [Sitten] are the primary focus of the highest custodians of the state; they are precondition[s] for a state's good fortune and prosperity. Nothing may be sacrificed to them . . . Become men! Have respect for yourselves! Have respect for the public!Footnote 101
Once again we encounter the widespread assumption that the public sphere had to be cultivated by the right people. That some (probably younger) writers violated the well-established rules shows us that Woellner had a point and that the traditional understanding of the enlightened public sphere was showing its age. What had once been a necessary and fruitful bargain between the elite and the state became for many, in a post-Revolutionary context, an unjust restraint on thought. In Prussia, at least, the future belonged to another kind of public sphere, perhaps a more brutal one, in which the nation rather than an educated and official public spoke most loudly.Footnote 102
Considering the public sphere along these lines suggests two conclusions about the Edict on Religion. First, it did not represent the end of the Enlightenment, but was an end.Footnote 103 That is to say, disciplining the populace through state power was one outcome of the German Enlightenment's long-standing association with the state. Second, those who criticized the edict most harshly broke with many of the German Enlightenment's traditions. By the late 1780s the marriage between enlightened publicity and public order was coming to an end. Religious reactionaries were not, however, to blame for this breakup. To the extent that fault can be assigned, much of it lay in the inability of traditional elites to maintain control over “their” public. By the French Revolution's outbreak, social disciplining by an official elite no longer offered solutions and, for some of the most radical writers, seemed to be part of the problem.
